About Me
(and this project)

I program things.    Lots of things on lots of platforms.

As a 40-something it is difficult for me to consider myself an old guy.   But, I guess when you start describing your programming experience in terms of decades, some degree of oldness must be present.

I wrote code for BBSs in middle school, DOS Code in Turbo Pascal in High School, VB in College, VB.Net in my early career and these days I muddle around in C#, Swift, Objective-C, Kotlin & PHP, often in the same day.

I've written some very cool things for businesses and I've made plenty of folks wealthy by bringing their ideas to life.  That's what I do, I build things and I love doing it.

The thing is.. Every month it seems there is another Javascript framework, an upgrade to Angular, a major .Net framework shift or some other platform upheaval. Smart people with PHDs employed with Apple, Google and Microsoft need to stay busy, after all.

The Nuget packages always need to be updated, the Pods are always out of date, the Gradle dependencies are behind. There is always a project manager to pepper the work week with just enough meetings to keep your focus shallow & always a new business opportunity that shuffles the development priorities.

In order to keep from sliding into a perpetually morose and jaded viewpoint an outlet was needed. It needed to be technical or nerdy, artistic and tactile. It needed to challenge different sectors of my brain than are used to troubleshoot Azure and AWS outages.

I wasn’t looking for a teaspoon of sugar to help the medicine go down. It was more like a Margarita with friends & coworkers on Friday to make the mid-day Monday Meeting more meaningful. (Especially when that meeting should have been an email.)

So, that’s how I got into Arcade & Pinball stuff. This hobby checked all of these boxes for me. It was just-escapist-enough to keep me fresh for work on Monday but not so much that I felt like I wasted the weekend on the couch watching Netflix. It has problem solving and history and art and music and some really solid people.